So basically I was expecting an actual bio dungeon where necromorphs or similar biological aberrations lived and evolved through LitRPG devices, but instead I got this thing.
Half of the story is about Michael teen, which is fantasy as generic as it gets, and the other half is pseudo realistic immune system which runs out of content halfway through the book, which since it's only half the story already it means it runs out in just a quarter of the story.
PR: After Michael fails to secure some gem that is never revealed what it does, the thieves guild decides to make an example out of him and after torturing him for a couple of hours, they ditch him in a mine which is scheduled to be closed off the day after. Luckily or unluckily for Michael, when as part of the torture the thugs have him swallow a handful of dirt and stones he incidentally also ingest a peeble sized dungeon core. Why did the dungeon not activate to do dungeon stuff like it always does, why did it end up in a mine of all places and what are the odds for the one handful of dirt to contain the dungeon core...
Anyway. After Proton or Prophet or whatever the core named itself bores its way to the appendix, he finds that while Michael was lucky he definitely wasn't and he's in for a life's worth of efforts to patch up the street urchin, including but not limited to: some kind of pneumonia, some suspiciously intelligent gut infection, something else on the throat, the other non dungeon core rocks and of course all years of starvation. Ah, also cancer because why not. To make matters worse, this Michael person keeps doing stuff that endangers him, like eating trash and drinking suspicious "health potions" from the dumpster, that's when he's not getting stabbed of course. Honestly if I was Proto I'd take a look around and be like
In a practical sense most the plot is just Proto spamming some of the most common immune cells, which are described as white blobs. I got to say that given the poor election of premise the author chose, the first couple battles all the way up to the stomach were interesting and well written for the most part, but the rest is just a repeat of the same. I'm a bit ashamed of myself to only have noticed that the book was written in the middle of 2020 pandemic when the virus is portrayed as so much more deadly than the bacteria when it's a known fact that bacteria is more deadly in general and particularly on medieval settings where antibiotics didn't exist. Granted, there's healing magic but the premise of the book assumes it doesn't work on diseases.
The Michael side of the story is a bit more boring. He crawls out the mine, then he sleeps in his crush's basement while being fed scraps, gets a "job" as an adventurer. Eventually, the thugs from before reach out to him because they need an inside man but do such a poor job at convincing him that they get ambushed and convicted. Later, Micheal gets attacked as a reprisal for this but the thieves guild arc ends there.
Overall, I'd say that the premise was weak to begin with and gets further diluted in the Michael side of the story which nobody cares about since it doesn't concern the bio dungeon. At first, I thought it was to show the effects of having a literal dungeon core inside your body but like I said it's like its not even there. With that said I understand why the author felt compelled to add this POV as his overly realistic depiction of the immune system made it so the new content run dry in a few chapters, not that this is enough to justify making what's ultimately a promising yet boring and unrewarding experience. Not much going on here... 3/10
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